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Hai Bing (Berghai)

This is a question to all of you who, like me, love the components of the game (apart from the colour choice: Green Germans and Grey Americans? Whats going on there? Typo in the email to the publishers?) and the general theme, but are frustrated at the strong motivation in the victory conditions not to use the abilities on the cards.

Specifically, if you don't use the abilities, but your opponent does, he has to put up his cards to defend his bases, and its relatively easy for you to shoot down his tanks (at 1 VP apiece, not to mention the 5 point bonuses you might get from achievements for having the most VPs of a given color) whereas all he can do is destroy your bases, netting 9 VPs most, and by the time he's managed to amass enough heavy tanks, or pairs of tanks of the right colour to do that, you'll easily have more VPs than the 9 he can possibly get( OK, he could eventually afford an invulnerable tank, but could he expect to overhaul the medal total you'll have accumulated by then? I doubt it).

Has anyone tried introducing house rules to fix that (to me, glaring) hole? Possible options that occur to me:

- When you buy a tank or other unit with a defense strength you must immediately use it to defend a base (as though you had just used its abilities)- To destroy a defending unit, you must beat its defense strength - not just equal it. Otherwise, you just damage it as now.- Equaling or beating the defense strength of a defending unit just damages it. If your attack strength is lower that your opponents defense strength, the attack has no effect.

Feels to me as though the first of these would stop people from winnig by not defending bases, but perhaps there's a case for the others as well.

There are a number of changes made in the expansion that seem designed to address this.

One is that you score your own bases at the end of the game if they weren't destroyed. If you adopted that rule into the core game, I wonder if that'd be enough on its own to make defending your bases important.

The expansion also forces you to assign a defender after attacking, but that seems clunky.

So I just ran through a two-player game, partly to test this, and partly just to get my head around how the game works.

The player who used abilities and defended bases took all three bases off the opponent, for nine medals. The player who didn't use abilities took seven medals. The achievements were even; four would have gone to each player, with four tied.

Obviously one game doesn't really prove anything, and I felt like the player not using abilities had some bad luck, but without using any abilities your deck does get clogged up with medals, and you can't get rid of your starter cards. It looks like if you scored points for surviving bases, not defending them would be giving the game away, but in the base game I can see it being viable.